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These Earthly Cares
by Brighid
Author's disclaimer: The boys and their universe do not belong to me in the material sense, just the spiritual. This is not for profit, but for love.
warning. I mean, I use 'em, but I don't have guys wiggling about singing them to one another. If I was going to do that, I'd choose something other than Loreena McKennitt. Lovely as she is, I don't think the boys could do her justice. I'm not sure I do, at any rate. Thanks to those who've always offered feedback.
These Earthly Cares
by Brighid
I: The Sorrows of Stone
When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone.
(Dante's Prayer, Loreena McKennitt)
I spent three years wishing for quiet; nowadays, I fucking hate it. It's oppressive, it's terrifying. It echoes. It's empty, like that moment, by the fountain -- utter quiet, because the one sound I was looking for wasn't there. Some things, you don't ever think about until they're gone, but afterwards, shit, you're lost without them.
I'm lost without his heartbeat. I hadn't even realized how much I'd come to depend on it until there was this silence, this space where it used to be and it was like I was cast adrift, like whatever it was that anchored me here and now had just plain torn loose. Fucking terrifying, needing something that much, something so basic and elemental. I went fucking crazy. I reached through him into the next world to pull him back, get him back, just for the sound of it.
I can't live without his heartbeat.
Tonight, the silence is eating away at me. I've cleaned everything twice, I've done the laundry and bought groceries and tried to watch some video I rented but underneath it all it's quiet. I've lost my focus, can't get a grip on anything I'm touching, it just keeps slipping from my fingers, through my senses. I try a beer but it's sour. I try coffee but I drop the mug, cracking the handle. I try cold water but it tastes sharp as metal, almost blood-like, like his mouth at the fountain; I throw the plastic bottle against the wall, and it cracks apart, leaving a spreading wet stain.
And not even the echo of the impact can touch the silence.
I hate this, I hate needing this. It's a weakness to need anything this much. You can't depend on anything, anyone. People die. People leave. People forget. Needing them is setting yourself up for self-destruction. But it's almost two in the morning and I'm half-crazy with walking the floor, and it's need and I don't seem to have much say in the matter at all.
I leave the broken water bottle, the cracked mug, the spreading stains of water and coffee and grab my coat and keys, heading for the truck. I can't stay here, I can't fucking stand here. I can't sit still or think or even goddamned breathe, and there's only one answer for it, much as I hate it, as much as I know it's a weakness.
II: The Dawn Seemed Forever Lost
I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars.
(Dante's Prayer, Loreena McKennitt)
There is a pile of tests at my right hand, a pile of essays at my left, and a pile of notes for my next paper in front of me. I've been alternating between the three of them for the last seven hours, trying to get caught up, trying to make up for all the things I've let slide in the last little while. Dying, jungle expeditions and pneumonia tend to take a lot out of you, especially when done in rapid succession, and I've gotten further behind than I can manage. As a result I've been spending every waking hour and the few I should be sleeping getting caught up. And I've been spending it here, because although I've moved back in with Jim, it's not really home there. I don't feel right spreading out my mess on the dining room table, or wandering around in the middle of the night drinking stale coffee. It's all still too frigging tenuous, like I'm visiting someone.
And he keeps not looking at me, whenever I look up at him, but the rest of the time ... I can feel him watching me, waiting for something, searching for something. I can't figure out what he's looking for, and I've got to admit it's got me on edge. It's like he's waiting for me to do something, waiting for something to drop or explode or bite him on the ass. It's kinda hard to work under those conditions.
Y'know, when I woke up in the hospital, full of a dream about a wolf and a panther and a flash of light, it seemed settled somehow, worked-out on the cosmic level. Hell, maybe it is. Unfortunately, I happen to be paired with a guy who likes to pretend he doesn't have a cosmic level, so whatever happened there hasn't managed to filter down to this plane of existence yet. Our spirit guides might be curled up and cozy, but we're still sniffing around each other, trying to figure out the new world order.
So here I am, at some godless hour of a Saturday morning, sifting papers back and forth across my desk and trying very hard not to think. Trying not to think about whether or not home will ever be home again, and whether or not Jim and I'll ever be anything again, and not really succeeding at any of it. I'm starting to hate school, I'm starting to hate everything Sentinel and the silence that's taken up residence like the proverbial dragon in the house, the one that keeps growing and growing until the house splits apart. I sigh and just bang my forehead lightly onto the desktop in front of me, and wonder what the hell I'm doing here. Here or anywhere, for that matter.
The sound of footsteps in the hall makes me lift my head, makes me regret the six gazillion cups of coffee I've drunk, makes my heart go triple time. The building is empty, except for me and the night guard, and he did his rounds in this wing about twenty minutes ago. Besides, these steps are too firm and fast for Eric's slow, shuffling walk. And they're heading straight for my office.
I drop down, crawl across the floor to the blind spot of the door, hating the goddamned glass window all of a sudden. It makes me feel naked, here, ass hanging out and utterly exposed. The glow from the security lights is suddenly obscured as whomever it is halts outside my door, presses up to the glass. A moment later the door flings open and the doorknob catches me on the hip. I grunt involuntarily, but it doesn't matter, my visitor is turning to me.
"What the fuck are you doing, Sandburg?" Jim Ellison demands and I'm so totally relieved and so totally pissed off at the same time I'm not sure which way to go first.
Pissed off wins, hands-down. "Honing my frigging survival instincts, you asshole! How the hell am I supposed to react to someone heading for my door in the middle of the fucking night? I've not had the best of luck in here, y'know?" He flinches, stone face cracking a little, and the look in his eyes makes me stop, makes me take a deep breath. "I was scared," I offer softly, honestly. "I'm. still. real. scared."
He reaches out, then, grabs me and manhandles me into a hug that's gonna leave button-marks on my face. His heart is doing its own little salsa number under his shirt, and all of a sudden I get it, I mean I really get it, and I let myself crawl into him, let him take me in and re-integrate me into himself. I've been so busy being scared I forgot that's, like, where he lives. I write a frigging chapter on his fear-based responses, but still can't figure it out when it's going down right in front of me.
He pushes me away, eventually, moves his hands up to cup my face, his thumbs wiping the sweat away from around my eyes. "Please come home, Sandburg," he says. "Just ... come home."
It's the first time he's said that to me, y'know, the first time he's asked, and it hits me like a freight train. I start bawling like a baby, and then he's pulling me in and shushing me and muttering something about it being too quiet and won't I please come home again?
I want to. I really, really want to.
III: From the Fountain
Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and the fire.
(Dante's Prayer, Loreena McKennitt)
He just sort of loses it, his face crumbling in on itself, his body trying to shake itself apart, and it feels like I've got to just hang on or lose him forever. I've never been too great at hanging on. I mean, shit, I've hung on to things, to ideas, to grudges, but people ... they've always just slipped away, one way or another. I never got the hang of hanging on, not until Sandburg, and I even fucked that up, it seems.
He wouldn't have drowned in that jesusfucking fountain if I'd been hanging on, now would he?
He's muttering something into my shirt, and I've got to focus, crank my hearing up to catch it, and he's crying so hard it sounds like another language, a bunch of nonsense words until I finally figure them out, work them out between the sobs and the snot.
"I really, really wan' come home, man, but you never asked, I din' know, din' know..," and it's a list of my sins, really, like the one Dad made me put together before dragging my ass off to confession. Didn't hang on, didn't offer a hand up, didn't bring him home. Back to the loft, yes, but home, that's something different, isn't it?
It's what the loft became about five seconds after he and that stupid monkey moved in. Only I never fucking told him that, did I? And Blair does words, that's his thing, that's what he knows. So I give him the words. He's already given his goddamned life, I can spare the words, can't I?
"I want you home, Chief. It's not home without you, wasn't home until you, just come home, please," I say, and he's got me crying, too, but I don't think he'll notice, not through all the blubbering he's doing. All this inside him, holding it in around me, both of us trapped by the other guy's silence ... shit.
We're fucking morons.
I'm so afraid of needing him, and he's just as afraid of needing me, and because of that he died.
He died.
"I'm so fucking sorry, Chief." I say it into his hair, against the sweaty skin at his temple, against his forehead, anywhere I can touch him with the words, looking for any excuse to just taste him, to replace the memory of his cold skin, the sour tang of fountain water, the bitterness of death. He's warm and salty on my tongue, he tastes alive and warm and salty-sweet and I'm lost in a flash of brilliance, like at the fountain, like in my vision in the grotto. Suddenly it's there between us again, the jungle and the heat and the steam, with Rainier and reality fading into nothing.
Blair's standing before me, naked as the day he was born, only he's not just Blair, he's got the wolf in him, too. There's a sharpness to his smile, and his eyes are wrong, but it doesn't matter, it's still him. "We're sorry, too." There's a panther curling around his legs, twining and turning and rubbing against him, and he reaches down to touch it, to run his fingers through its fur and down its spine. With a shudder, I feel the caress along my own body, and it feels so fucking good. Like being alive again.
"We walk one path, or we go nowhere," he continues, his hands buried in the purring cat, buried in me. "We travel it together, or the journey ends forever. Do you understand that, Sentinel? Together, or not at all."
I force my eyes open, force myself to meet the wolf's gaze. "I can't choose for him," I manage at last. He grins at me, a hell of a lot of teeth for one mouth.
"He has already chosen, Sentinel, when he came back to you, when we three became one. We have only been waiting for you." He holds out his arms to me, holds himself open. I copy the movement, and brace myself for the impact as first the panther, then the Blair-wolf jumps inside me with a flash of light that blinds me, sears the skin off my bones.
For the first time in my life, I don't feel empty.
Then it's Rainier again, and reality, and a sweaty, tear-stained Guide who's looking pretty poleaxed at the minute. He opens his mouth to say something, to say a thousand somethings, like always; I just cover his mouth with mine, feeling him inside and out. "Shh. Let's just go home, Chief," I say at last. He nods jerkily and stuffs everything on his desk into his knapsack and locks up and leads the way out of the building. I follow him out, lost in the sound of his heartbeat, already halfway home.
IV: Wings to Fly
Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars.
(Dante's Prayer, Loreena McKennitt)
Jim Ellison kissed me. On the mouth. For a long, long time.
And I liked it.
A lot.
Paradigm shift. Whiplash.
One minute I was wondering what happened to happily ever after, and the next he's re-enacting the Disney fairy tale of your choice. With tongue.
Did I mention that I liked it?
In between, of course, was the whole sobbing in his arms and the vision-quest landscape merging-into-one thing, but right now I'm sort of obsessed with the whole kissing/tongue thing. I've never gotten beard burn from a kiss before, unless you count that cross-dresser, and that's a whole other thing, right there, and...
Jim's hand snakes out, plants itself smack in the middle of my chest. "Calm down, Chief," he says softly, his voice rumbling like the panther's purr, and that's got me shaking so hard I'm afraid I'm gonna bite my tongue, and so hard that I'm shaking. He keeps his hand on me, even as he drives us home, leaving my Volvo to be picked up later. But it's so much more than his hand on my chest. I can feel him all around me, surrounding me, and inside me, too. It's the single most exhilarating and terrifying sensation of my life.
It's like this: I like girls. I really, really like girls. They smell good. They taste good. They feel real good. I know them, I'm familiar with the territory and pretty fucking good at them. Life is a banquet, to quote Auntie Mame. I've spent the last, christ, sixteen years really liking girls.
But right now, I'm figuring out that liking girls is a distant second to loving Jim Ellison. I put my hand up over his, lace our fingers together. Together. Or not at all. The words echo inside me, my voice and yet not mine, and I know the truth of it, feel it as certainly as I feel the heat of his hand sinking into me. I risk a glance at his profile, and he's smiling out into the night, and I start grinning, too. Anybody driving alongside us will think we're a couple of maniacs, and maybe they'd be right.
It's sort of like that episode of Next Gen, where Worf keeps sliding quantum realities, ending up in one where he and Troi are together, much to his surprise.
Even more surprising, when he realizes how right it feels.
That's what I feel like: I've slid into an alternate quantum reality, and although everything's all wrong -- it's all right, too. All I really know for sure is that I want to feel Jim's hands everywhere, I want to come home in him and have him come home in me, and that's where we're heading and it's the right direction even if it's a one-eighty from where I was going before.
We pull up in front of 852 Prospect, and even as he kills the engine his hand is fisting in my shirt, pulling me to him as we both fumble with seatbelts. A heartbeat, maybe two, and this time I'm kissing him, and I'm more that just liking it. He smells good. He tastes better. He feels fucking terrific. And I know him, I'm familiar with the territory, getting pretty damned good at it. Life is a banquet, and I'm about to stuff myself. The thought that this might be a literal thing pops into my head, and I start giggling into his mouth.
He pulls back, looks at me with a mixture of love and annoyance. "You're fucking weird, Sandburg," he says softly when I explain the cause and I grin at him, can't help it. I'm flying, I'm so high on him.
"Not yet, but I will be," I reply, crawling into his lap and kissing him so hard that I might just meet up with that part of me that's already inside him. Together.
V: Breathe Life
Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We'll rise above these earthly cares.
(Dante's Prayer, Loreena McKennitt)
We tumble through the door, groping like a couple of horny teenagers, and it's a wonder we don't wake up the neighbours. I don't even notice how hard the floor is until there's suddenly nothing between it and me. Somehow he's made half my clothes and most of his disappear. The only reason I'm able to pull enough brain cells together to notice anything is because he's stopped, he's looking around and shaking his head.
"What happened in here, man?" he asks, his eyes big and shifting from black pupil to blue iris as he takes in the debris I'd left behind.
"I was having a bad night," I admit, and he snorts and turns back into my arms, pressing his hot mouth against my throat.
"No shit," he says quietly against my carotid. The breath of his words against my skin, the tenderness of his tone makes me shudder in reaction. "Gonna have to make it a real good night from now on," he continues, and that, too, makes me shudder.
"Be a better night if we get up off the floor," I manage at last, even as he tongues his way down my body, but he just pauses, glances up at me, and his eyes gleam feral, wolf-bright in the darkness of the loft.
"You think?" he growls softly against my belly, nuzzling down into the crease of my thigh, mouthing me through denim. His busy fingers undo the button and the fly. His strong hands pull jeans and boxers down in one smooth move, only to catch on my shoes that never quite came off. A part of me wants to stop, to slow up, to do this right, but there isn't time, not right now, not this time.
It's like the first time, all over again, it passes in a blur of heat and mouth and hand. I know that when I try to remember it, it'll come back as a series of moments, fractured memories of a whole, because it's just too much to hold all together. Too much, too much, the taste of him of him, the feel of him, the way his back muscles flex under my hands, the way his mouth tastes of me, the way his hair trails over me and sets my nerve endings on fire.
One thing will stand out, stands out, is constant: his face over mine, lost in pleasure, lost in me, and then his eyes opening again, wild and unfocused and so fucking happy I could come all over again if I had a drop to spare. He just stares at me for the longest time, then leans down and runs his tongue up and over the side of my face, through my hair. I kiss him, hard, pull him to me, wrapping him up in my arms and legs and holding on so hard it's a wonder he can even breathe.
"Next time," I whisper. "We make it to a bed. And we do it right."
He laughs, a soft huff of air against my ear. "Felt pretty right to me," he says lazily, sleepily.
I roll us both onto our sides, run my hand down his body, over his hip to cup his ass and bring us together. "I mean right, Chief," I say, and it's my turn to growl.
His eyes fly open at that, pupils once again wide and deep. "Man, not that I don't, y'know, want that, but I don't ... I've never. Hmmmmm," he says, and yawns slightly, shrugging an apology even as he uses one of my shoulders to cover his mouth. "MMMmmmmmm. Never done that. Wouldn't know how," he finishes at last.
I kiss his shoulder, hide my mouth against it, but I know he can feel the smile. "I have. I do."
He starts laughing at that, laughing so hard he falls out of my arms and flops over on his back. "Why the fuck does that not surprise me? I mean, yeah, I'm surprised, but I'm not surprised, y'know?" He shakes his head. "You've repressed everything else, why not this? You've got a brother, you swing both ways, you actually like professional wrestling. Anything else I should know, while we're here?" He wipes at his eyes, rolls back on his side to look at me. "Man, you've got to start telling me these things ahead of time, y'know? I don't want to be hauling any Judy Garland records outta your closet, or finding non-regulation cuffs under the bed, not without having discussed 'em ahead of time. We've moved way beyond a 'need to know' basis. Haven't we?" There's a wistfulness there, and a warning.
"Yeah," I reply. "Way beyond. And what's wrong with professional wrestling?" I roll over and up, despite the awkwardness of my pants around my ankles, and then haul him to his feet. "Let's grab a shower, go to bed. You get things started, and I'll be there in a second, all right?"
He grins at me, a big, sleepy smile with a hell of a lot of teeth for one mouth. "You're going to clean up the mess you made," he says softly, laughing, and then crows and shakes his head when I start to squirm. "I know you, man, I, like, so totally know you." He sounds both contented and a little awed by that realization. "I know you," he repeats, stretching up to grab both my ears, and he's kissing me so hard our teeth scrape. Then he's off to the bathroom, bare Blair ass beautiful by moonlight.
Moonlight?
Hmmm. Maybe we should've closed the shades. Then again, I'm the only Sentinel in the neighbourhood. I shrug, hitch up my jeans, and then go under the sink for something to spray on the coffee stain. I whistle as I scrub, just enjoying the sounds of Sandburg filling up the loft.
I need his heartbeat.
And that, maybe, is my greatest strength.
An End.
(bare Blair ass, even)
End These Earthly Cares.